November 2010

As I wrote in my last blog, last week I was in Budapest. Budapest is a great place. Turns out some time ago, there were two different cities on the banks of the Danube – one called Pest and one called Buda. They were then unified to create a single city called….drum roll please…Budapest!

Earlier this week, I was in Budapest for our EMEA Connections event. If you want a very good overview of the event, please read Rich Tehrani’s blog at http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/rich-tehrani/4g/dialogic-connections-2010-live-blog.html. Rich was not able to blog live while he was in action (he was interviewing Dialogic’s Doug Sabella and Kevin Cook in a talk-show format) and he was a little leery of me blogging for him from his computer, but he did a great job . I think Rich has a future in TV and/or politics!

One of the underlying themes at the event is that while we are undergoing tremendous change within the telecommunications industry, because of various technological enhancements such as broadband wireless, cloud computing and VoIP -- who will be the big service providers in 10 years, how will people generally communicate in 10 years, what are the revenue models going to be -- there is huge opportunity for everyone in this change.

If Location-Based Services indeed might be moving to be more “context” based (and in last week’s blog I described “context” as having to involve some kind of database to make the service more relevant to you), then are there any potential privacy issues associated with this? Likely there are, and many of them can be resolved if the user wants “context” and therefore opts in to obtaining this context since the user would see a value to it.

With the advertisement example, I can see a user opting in for certain types of restaurant ads or promotions.

I've written about Location-Based Services a few times, most recently on September 28th, and I came across the term Context-Aware Location-Based Services. In doing research on this topic, I found the top results from a web search are some academic papers, including this academic paper which goes into much detail. But there are many of them and it appears this is hot academic research topic.
If I had to boil it down, the difference between LBS and Context-Aware LBS would involve a database of some sort that "knows" something about you. For instance, in the LBS example I showed in the September 28th blog, an advertisement for a restaurant appeared on the user's mobile phone. Perhaps that advertisement was sent to anyone within a certain amount of blocks of the restaurant. That would be an example of a location-based advertisement. But perhaps also that ad only appeared on that user's mobile phone since the owner of that mobile phone had been there before and/or had opted in to some future advertising promotion. So the ad appearing was much more in context.
I can also envision some kind of service that is integrated with your calendar. For example, I am constantly changing the type of ring tone of my mobile phone depending on what I'm doing. Why do I really need to do that - why can't the mobile phone integrate with my calendar and change the ring tone to either what I've done in the past in certain situations, or change it depending on the type of activity I'm doing on my calendar.